It sounds odd when you put it like that… but actually it’s just how we say it

I spent the last week working with the Koro Ashe Translation team again. They are based 3 hours to the west but we worked this week in Jos. (If you receive news and prayer requests from Wycliffe.org.uk you might have heard mention of them as they are supported in particular by some British churches.)

Some more interesting features of Ashe language came out in Luke 12, where Jesus says he has come not to bring peace but division. ‘Peace’ is expressed as ‘lying heart’ (that is, ‘restful mind’) which had me rather puzzled until it was explained. And where I was expecting a mother-in-law to pop up divided against her daughter-in-law, we ended up with ‘grandmother’. Ashe uses ingkoko ‘grandmother’ and then wife-of-her-son in this situation. That is one of those situations where it sounds odd in English, but everything is OK as far as the Ashe translation is concerned; they had done their job well. Merely translating the 3 English words ‘mother-in-law’ piece-by-piece would have been perplexing and meaningless and also not faithful to the original Greek.